Notes.

I have to start this newsletter with a correction. Last time, I said that I thought CircleCI was the Clojure company that had raised the most money. I was wrong, Nubank has raised $820 million dollars, and has a valuation over $10 billion dollars. That makes them one of the most highly valued fintech startups. For context Stripe’s most recent valuation in 2019 put them at $22.5 billion dollars.

Since the last newsletter I’ve been to Belgium and back for Heart of Clojure. It was a great event and I’m very happy I got to go. I met lots of readers and Clojurists Together members which was a big highlight for me.

-main

• The talks from Heart of Clojure have just gone up, including my talk Building Stable Foundations
• I wrote about why I think Heart of Clojure was so special. See also reflections from Fork This Conference, The people’s conference, The hallway track conference, Community with lots of heart, and A courageous conference?
• What’s the state of error messages?
• ClojureScript Pixel Game Engine With Blender Live-reloading
• Frameworks and Why (Clojure) Programmers Need Them
• I talked with Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant about his PhD in Typed Clojure.
• Clojurists Together is funding Shadow CLJS with Thomas Heller, Meander with Joel Holdbrooks, Calva with Peter Strömberg, and CIDER with Bozhidar Batsov. This is thanks to the generosity of all of the members of Clojurists Together.
• How CircleCI processes over 30 million builds per month
• Beyond Clojurists Together is a page listing Clojure projects that you can support directly.

Libraries & Books.

• Metosin continue to push performance boundaries, this time with porsas, an experimental set of tools for doing JDBC queries in idiomatic Clojure but with Java performance.
• Erik Norman’s new book Grokking Clojure is out in Manning’s early access program. You can get a 50% discount with code MLNORMAND.

People are worried about Types. ?

• Functional Works has written a very extensive guide to spec
• Metosin has written about their motivations for Malli, their new data schema tool for Clojure/Script.

Foundations.

• “Describing all non-copying relocating collectors as ‘Mark Compact’ is like referring to the bulk of zoology as the study of non-elephant animals.” - Mechanical Sympathy
• If you’ve been hankering to mix your Rust code with Clojure, Rüstigraben is a work-in-progress to let you run Rust code in GraalVM.

Tools.

• Speaking on Nubank, they’ve open sourced Workspaces, a devcards-like UI component development library.
• salt is an experimental tool to convert a subset of Clojure into TLA+ (!)
• Calva Funding and Reinforcements and more!
• clj-kondo now has support for emitting analysis data
• Also from Michiel Borkent, babashka lets you write a subset of Clojure in shell scripts or other places you need quick startup. sci is the Small Clojure Interpreter that is backing it.
• jet, again from Michiel Borkent is a CLI tool for transforming between JSON, EDN, and Transit
• Community Tools and Templates for Clojure CLI Tools
• Setting up Neanderthal with REBL and Cursive from fellow kiwi Nick Jones.
• lvh has written wernicke, a Graal based data redaction tool. This is especially useful for transforming production data into a form safe to use in tests.

Recent Developments.

• Journal 2019.22 - spec updates, tools.deps

Learning

• Parens of the Dead is back after a hiatus. These are screencasts building games in Clojure and ClojureScript. You can catch the first three episodes of season 2 on Twitch.
• A quick summary of how to interop with JS from ClojureScript.

Misc.

Fast Software, the Best Software, and Performance Matters are two good reflections on performance.

I’m Daniel Compton. I maintain public Maven repositories at Clojars, private ones at Deps, and help fund OSS Clojure projects (along with tons of generous members like Pitch, Nubank, JUXT, Metosin, Adgoji, and Funding Circle) at Clojurists Together. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, tell your friends to sign up at therepl.net, or post a link in your company chatroom. If you’ve seen (or published) a blog post, library, or anything else Clojure/JVM related please reply to this to let me know about it.

If you’d like to support the work that I’m doing, consider signing up for a trial of Deps, a private, hosted, Maven Repository service that I run.

Thanks!